Ask
the college professor standing in line at a market in Moscow, Idaho why he’s
buying Pres-to-Logs and he’ll tell you he heats his backyard woodshop with them.
Ask the soccer mom in Colorado why she’s picking up Pres-to-Logs from a
convenience store, and she answers that they’re perfect for her Girl Scout
troop’s weekend campout. Finally, ask both of these consumers when Pres-to-Logs
were invented and they guess maybe the 1970s. But they’re 40 years off. The
handy sawdust logs got their start in 1930, when Robert Bowling, an engineer at
Potlatch Corporation in Lewiston, Idaho invented them as a way to use excess
sawdust and other wood waste. When the forest industry brainstorms about what to
do with all that small-diameter timber waiting to be thinned from our
overstocked Western forests, people need to review the Pres-to-Log story. As
community development specialists mull the Fuel for Schools programs, they too
should know industry’s track record for innovation.

The Pres-to-Log story addresses
community development, practical economics, industrial efficiency and that
popular buzzword, “sustainability.” “Turn Waste Into Profit” – that became the
marketing slogan of the 30s as Pres-to-Logs were distributed through Wood
Briquettes, Inc., based in Lewiston. A 1950s-era sales booklet for Pres-to-Log
machines advertised the logs as “A proved and profitable fuel product, made by
compressing clean, dry sawdust, shavings and other fibrous waste in
‘Pres-to-Log’ machines.” The booklet advertised that the product efficiently
utilized not only sawdust, but also green waste, and required no binders in its
manufacturing processes. As it said in its history of Pres-to-Log development,
“Problems created opportunities.”

That sounds like instant replay
for today’s forest industry. A June 1937 article by Roy Huffman in the Potlatch
Corporation’s monthly newsletter, The Family Tree, further concluded,
“Pres-to-Logs are here to stay.” Like today’s Pres-to-Logs, the products
of yesterday produced no dirt, no smoke, no soot, no odor and no ash, plus they
were easy to handle and store. The marketing booklet boldly bragged, “For
cooking service, Pres-to-Logs are unequalled.

They provide constant, uniform
heat. A housewife soon learns the exact part of a Pres-to-Log necessary to cook
a particular meal…Many people find that a third of a Pres-to-Log will cook an
ordinary meal.” While Depression-era housewives popped the little logs into
their wood cook stoves, others burned them in room heaters, hot water heaters
and bake ovens. Pres-to-Logs turned up in ship’s galleys, railroad dining cars
and service stations, as well. Markets were wide open for convenience and
efficiency, and the uniformly shaped logs earned the title “modern” for
eliminating tedious trips for firewood. Pres-to-Log sales representatives
summarized, “A large part of these Pres-to-Logs was sold in the West, the most
competitive fuel market in the world. Here every type of fuel is available —
coal, wood, oil, natural and manufactured gas.

Tugboat on Lolo Creek in
Idaho using Pres-to-logs for heating fuel.

The acceptance of Pres-to-Logs in
the face of this competition, and the unfulfilled demand prove these important
facts – Pres-to-Logs have distinct advantages over other types of fuel, and
manufacturing them is a proved, permanent, practical and profitable business.”
By the late 40s, 18 machines worked around the clock seven days a week at
Potlatch mills at Lewiston, Potlatch and Coeur d’Alene. Four machines came on
board at the company town of Scotia, California under the Pacific Lumber Company
banner. The Raymond Flash Dryer helped process green wastes at Capital Lumber
Company in Salem, Oregon. And a dozen Pres-to-Log machines churned out
inventories at Weyerhaeuser Timber Company at Everett, thanks to a huge demand
in the Puget Sound. Eventually Potlatch Corporation moved on to experiment with
paper products as other uses for wood wastes, while Pres-to-Logs took on a life
of their own, defining the word “sustainable.”

More and more machines churned out
the compressed logs in places like Africa, Peru and Yugoslavia. In the mid-50s,
Pres-to-Log plants cranked out the high-heat value fuel logs in Missoula,
Longview, Reno, Sacramento, Vancouver B.C. and Memphis, just to name a few other
locations. Because the logs were portable, housewives clamored for them in urban
settings, missionaries hauled them overseas to locations that had no dependable
heating fuels, and trains with limited storage facilities heated and cooked with
them. Fast forward to the 21st Century. If the technology and the Industrial
Revolution epitomized the past era, the new emphasis will be on efficiency and
sustainability. Here, the forest industry can point to Pres-to-Logs as the
textbook case of its ability to innovate. Who knows, the nation might end up
looking backward, into those old company newsletters and sales brochures for its
solutions. And the forest industry had better be ready.